Saturday, April 25, 2015

Alex of Viltess Empire

Recently I had the pleasure to study anime style under a close friend and skillful artist! I learnt so much that I felt mind blown every single class..! It was a very interesting approach since the focus slightly differs from what I have known thus far.

Also, I never drew in anime style before so it truly was challenging but fun experience. The design challenge was to either design a knight named Alex or a nature character named Morgan who both are from opposing country. I wanted to learn to render armor so I challenged myself to do Alex. He has 2 elements we could pick from, either light or fire.

I came up with a backstory for him being an anti hero main character. From the empire he came from he is a magnificent general and hero but from Morgan POV he truly is an arch enemy and rival that has slain many of her people.

In my mind he is a fiery, loud and cunning character. He could be cruel to enemies, smiling in delight as he crush them but to his comrades, he is dependable and protective. I imagined that he enjoys being on the battlefield and rarely return back to the empire, thus I made his cape rather tattered. For his fire magic, I referenced Naruto and Roy mustang’s fire a lot >_< It was not as simple as it looked! It took me one whole day of fixing until I had it right.

I look forward to hear what do you think about this character!

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Following are my development stages:

1. Ideation/design

Started off with the backstory and I have a couple of keywords in mind when designing him, mainly are knight/nobility. technology. evil/antihero. aggressive.In each version I kinda change the % of the keyword influence.

2. Poses/ further designing

I showed it to some friends and they chose B E F C, the instructor chose B and F. So taking those that has more votes, I drew some poses. Then I picked three that I like and put the design on top of it. In here I am mostly just trying out to show different personality and compositions in each exploration.

3.Color

2nd pose was chosen! Off I went to try different color variations. I went back to my keyword in each color, trying out to emphasize different things. Such as evil/anti hero or nobility. Since he is fire element I also tried making that as his main color. But I tried what if instead its orange and yellow too (D) and also what if he is light element instead (E). After this stage it was just rendering.. rendering and rendering!